Review

This one is mostly a swing and miss. Captain Durango almost got a bunch of people killed for no reason and nearly destroyed a priceless artifact. The whole thing was a petty manufactured conflict. The ascension subplot was annoying too. So apparently anyone can become an energy being now just by studying some alien religion? Plus it's entirely unclear why some replicators would have better food than others given that the whole point of replicators is to eliminate scarcity. Ransom's hysterical remark heavily implying people primarily use holodecks for sex is worth an extra point though. But one really good scene does not an episode make.

Review

This episode starts off with a tone straight out of Firefly and closes with a green-blooded Romulan decapitation followed by a space battle featuring an old style Romulan Bird of Prey straight out of TOS: Balance of Terror; cliffhangering with Seven of Nine! Whew! Hopefully we get a good explanation for why she showed up at just the right time. Was she following Picard? In any event, the space battle was one of the best ones featured in Star Trek in quite some time. Yes of course Discovery and the Kelvin films have their fair share of action, but often their action is overkill and not well earned. Unlike those, this dogfight between the La Sirena and the old style Romulan Bird of Prey isn't overwrought in the slightest. It's just the right amount of action we needed to add a bit more fun to an already fairly strong story.

The exchange between Picard and Senator Adrev was also a highlight of the episode as a window into the Romulan feelings of betrayal by the Federation. It's understandable that the excessively secretive nature of Romulan culture would cause many of them to believe that the Federation totally failing to organize a competent relief effort in the face of both overwhelming logistical challenges and internal political turmoil might have been an intentional conspiracy to lull Romulans into a false sense of security so that they would end up in a significantly weakened position by placing undue trust in an ancient enemy, leaving Picard in the unenviable position of exclaiming something to the effect of, "It's not what it looks like!" And having Picard express outrage to Elnor about needlessly killing Adrev when presumably a non-lethal way of subduing him would've sufficed was also a nice and necessary touch. It makes sense that Elnor would do that and that Picard would react to it that way.

There are only a few wrinkles in this episode. Adding "Emmet" to the flock of Rios' holograms further compounds the annoying ambiguity about the status of sentient holograms relative to the ban on androids. Also while the ending of this episode is great fun, the pacing of the episode otherwise drags a bit at times. Even so, this is one of the stronger episodes so far.

Review

In the next installment of Captain Ransom'sLorca's quest to capture creatures to power his experimental propulsion drive, the mad scientist captain astonishingly forgets what the creature was for and becomes inexplicably obsessed with its murky potential to be turned into a weapon somehow, despite its obvious and much more useful connection to the parallel spore propulsion experiments that were being conducted on the Glenn. It wasn't just Lorca who missed the obvious though. Literally everyone seems oblivious to this connection for half the episode for seemingly no reason. Burnham eventually figures it out, but not before Landry gets herself killed in the most embarrassingly stupid and unnecessary way imaginable in a reckless beyond words attempt to harvest its body parts to turn into weapons of some kind. If she had succeeded in killing the creature, she would've permanently destroyed its potential to be exploited for propulsion in exchange for weapons of questionable value at best.

Meanwhile Lorca and Stamets get into perhaps one of the pettiest arguments ever seen on Star Trek when Stamets whines again that he's a scientist, not a soldier, after which Lorca rhetorically invites Stamets to leave the ship. Stamets, evidently a bit dense, takes the rhetorical suggestion literally and threatens to "take everything" with him, after which Lorca has to literally remind him that the ship and all its contents are the property of Starfleet, so he can't really take his ball and go home. Ultimately, the only thing that convinced Stamets to go back to his job was Lorca passive aggressively broadcasting the death and carnage going on at Corvan II over the entire ship's intercom, in a seeming act of public humiliation directed at Stamets. Basically Stamets threw a temper tantrum and Lorca gave him a spanking in front of his schoolmates. But the narrative portrays it as though it ought to be compelling interpersonal conflict. Like super deep stuff, man!

Indeed, the episode is laced with similar false profundity everywhere. Some of it is in the small details, like Lorca casually name dropping Elon Musk alongside the Wright brothers and Zefram Cochrane, as though Musk's accomplishments, impressive as they may be, are even remotely comparable to inventing airplanes or inventing warp drive. They aren't. Other cringeworthy dialog included casually mentioning that Corvan II produces 40% of the Federation's dilithium, while also mentioning that there are no ships in range to protect it. These two facts are trotted out for dramatic effect, but all it really does is beg the question as to why the Federation would leave such a valuable asset so poorly defended to begin with. A related issue has to do with why the Discovery left Corvan II so quickly afterward. You'd think they'd stick around to provide relief to the colonists, but of course that wouldn't be anywhere near as cool as a dramatic exit, now would it? Likewise the uniform synthesizer scene put some seriously overwrought visual effects on display for seemingly no reason other than to go for a wow factor that falls flat.

The biggest offender in terms of false profundity though was the writing surrounding Burnham. Two scenes stick out like a sore thumb. First, the scene when she manipulates Saru into borrowing his threat ganglia as a means to see if the tardigrade was dangerous. Setting aside how overwhelmingly cringeworthy the entire concept of threat ganglia is to begin with, manipulating him into coming down there and then offending him with trickery was unnecessary. She could've just asked to borrow his threat ganglia. But, see, then it wouldn't be laced with unnecessary melodrama! Likewise, the second big Burnham scene that reeks of false profundity is Georgiou's letter to Burnham in her will. While it's always nice to see more of Georgiou, one of Star Trek: Discovery's few likable characters so far, hamming up the irony that Burnham became the opposite of what Georgiou imagined in her letter added no value to the story. All of that was made quite clear in the Battle at the Binary Stars. Repeating it all in a video will is just, well... repetitive. And closing the episode on a redundant scene wasn't a strong choice, especially when they could've depicted her struggling with the morality of inflicting pain on the tardigrade to save lives instead.

Also, they really need to slow down those Klingon subtitles.

Review

A nice premise goes sour. First we had the introduction of a few interesting minor crewmembers, of which I especially liked Elizabeth Cutler, then the peaceful exploration of a new world. The episode lacked contention, but it was far more pleasant than the previous two which were relatively dark and dreary. But night falls and the episode turns into a generic horror story quickly. The whole thing looked to me like an excuse to get the characters down on the planet acting all crazy. And it's not as if we haven't seen this cliche several times over in TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voyager...

Review

I don't think it was a very good idea to show two predestination time travel stories back to back, especially this early in the series. Another annoying detail was that the doomed civilization in this episode looked gasp exactly like humans! You'd figure the writers would be able to sort out these kinds of cliches by now, what with three television series behind them and two in progress. Guess not. That said, this "version" of the predestination plot is far more intelligently constructed. I like how Voyager was in fact the cause of the explosion and how Janeway realizes this and breaks the cycle. As a result, nothing in this episode actually happens. In the ending, Kes retains a memory of the events. Her intuitions make her kind of a combination of TNG's Troi and Guinan, which is both amusing and kind of cool. Overall, a decent episode, I largely forgive the reset button.

Review

An episode where the women take command because all the men are incapacitated is a nice change of pace, and certainly comically valuable. This episode features yet another alien race that looks exactly like humans though. Something almost totally unforgivable now that it can no longer be blamed on makeup for aliens being expensive. It's nice that Nurse Chapel's affection for Spock is once again revisited, creating some good continuity. Once again, the transporter is used to reduce aging, which annoys me. Spock says their chances of living through the procedure are extremely low, which makes up for any potential miracle cures for general aging, but once again our heroes beat the impossible odds. Just like they do with the slingshot effects, the life support belts, and half a dozen other things!

Review

The Naked Time is an effective comedy story mixed with a touching subplot regarding Chapel's unrequited love for Spock whom does not return her affection. He ignores her affection for him not because he does not feel the same for her, but because he feels he is ethically obligated to suppress those feelings because of his Vulcan heritage. The other side of the story is full of fun moments such as Sulu rampaging through the ship with a rapier and random members of the crew exhibiting generally amusing drunken disorderly conduct.

Unfortunately, this is all predicated on an exceptionally stupid mistake by the crewman who beamed down with Spock in the opening scenes. They're in a hazmat situation and the damn crewman takes off part of his protective suit in the middle of the investigation which is trying to determine what inexplicably killed that whole colony full of scientists! This is a degree of reckless incompetence that is so high that it makes it hard to be sympathetic to our heroes' plight. Then there's the painfully irrelevant ending. To save the ship from crashing down onto the planet, Spock invents... time travel? Seriously?

Worse yet, once the ship is saved, Kirk just sort of sits there and basically says, "gee golly, that's an interesting accidental discovery. We might have to use that deliberately some time." His casual indifference to the magnitude of such a discovery would be like someone from ancient Rome seeing an airplane for the first time and shrugging, as if there was little significance to the existence of such technology. Those issues aside though, the episode is highly enjoyable with very effective comedy.

Review

A man with a grudge against Odo clones himself, then murders his clone so that everyone will draw the conclusion that the only man who could have committed the murder was Odo, because his DNA would be at the scene of the crime due to the fact that he was the first investigator on scene. This is a somewhat overcomplex and slightly weak premise, but it works. The more emphasized plot regarding the Odo angst in this episode is a little more interesting. Unfortunately the mob mentality of this episode is silly and hard to believe.

Review

There is a decent idea for a story about diplomacy here, but it's buried beneath a lot of bad stylistic choices. It's pretty hard not to see the Ligonians as racist stereotyping and the conflict surrounding Yar as sexist stereotyping, particularly the scene where Data described the weapons as so light that even women could use them. Some smaller stylistic choices were awkward too, such as Data of all people tripping over his words with the "includling" line; a vocal mistake that is hard to suspend disbelief on, Beverly's unprofessional panicking about the vaccine, and a series of scenes with stilted dialog that the actors were clearly stumbling over. While the episode does have a few nice details and a few amusing scenes, what we have here is unfortunately mostly cringeworthy.